The first scene of his new series for NBC, “Chicago P.D.,” premiering Wednesday night, introduces the show’s protagonist: a dirty cop who beats a name out of a low-rung drug dealer and then takes his money.

Anti-heroes who have dark secrets and blood on their hands may be de rigueur on cable channels, but it’s still rare to find them at the center of a broadcast drama. “A cop show is a cop show is a cop show, but this has the most cable sensibility of any broadcast show, frankly, that I’ve ever seen,” Wolf said Tuesday over a drink at the Four Seasons hotel in New York.

Still, “Chicago P.D.” is a rigorously paced procedural at its core, and Wolf wants the new series to be the second pillar in a potential franchise. His plan, to use the Windy City in the way that New York spawned the “Law & Order” juggernaut, started last season with the premiere of “Chicago Fire.” Packed with heroics and a certain soap factor, “Chicago Fire” also had a dark presence in the form of corrupt Det. Hank Voight, who seeks to destroy a firefighter (Jesse Spencer) who got his son jailed for drunk-driving. Last January, NBC asked Wolf and his fellow executive producers (including Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Matt Olmstead) to consider a spin-off based on the gravel-voiced avenger, played by veteran character actor Jason Beghe. They promptly sent Beghe’s character to prison to help set up his next move: getting sprung by powerful allies so he could lead a police intelligence unit on “Chicago P.D.”

‘Law & Order’ and ‘Chicago P.D.’ creator Dick Wolf

Chris Haston/NBC

“You have no idea how much I want this to work,” said Wolf, who sees the Chicago shows as “siblings” whose characters occasionally cross between them, hopefully without awkwardness. The future of that framework will of course depend on how “Chicago P.D.” does in the ratings. The producer added, “Maybe this is an audacious statement, but I don’t know how to do a cop show any better than this. If this doesn’t work, maybe the era is over. I don’t know.”

Be that as it may, he has a few projects to fall back on. Wednesday night also sees the mid-season return of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Later this month, the unscripted series he produces for TNT, “Cold Justice,” in which two female investigators revive cold murder cases, comes back for a second season. And this week marks the release of Wolf’s second novel about a worldly New York detective named Jeremy Fisk.

“The Execution,” a follow-up to last year’s novel, “The Intercept,” entangles Fisk in the bloody world of a drug cartel. The story is told from both the perspective of the hero and that of a female agent from Mexico’s secret service. Pulling off that shifting point of view was a challenge, said Wolf, who is notoriously rigid about his rules of TV storytelling. That’s what made the “Law & Order” formula so predictable—and successful, he said: “It’s all about quality control. The stories don’t get better. The acting doesn’t get better. It’s consistency that gets a show to 300-400 episodes.”